Ilaria Di Biagio

This project takes Felice Vinci’s book The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales (1995) as its starting point. Stirred by the author’s proposition that the sources for The Iliad and The Odyssey originated around 2000 BC in Northern Europe, the Baltic region and the Northern Atlantic, Ilaria Di Biagio set off on her own journey to explore the resonances of this hypothesized geographical and temporal shift. Indeed, such revisions also imply a twist in the plot since these texts continue to carry weight in the European – and global – imagination. According to Vinci, the original epic tales travelled South with the founders of the Mycenaean civilization, and were orally transmitted across generations, until they were recorded in writing by Homer around the 8^th century BC.

This atmospheric series invites viewers into immersive seascapes and landscapes, places that linger on the border of fantasy, fiction and reality. As she explains: “I make no claim to confirm nor to refute Vinci’s thesis, but I find it intriguing to addresses how ‘history’ is transformed into ‘authority’.” Homer’s epics “talk about the eternal wandering of mankind, the changing climate, about doubt and perseverance”, she adds, while the characters’ journeys, their emotions, the trials and challenges they must overcome, mirror our own.